


i think this is how love goes (check yes or no)

by gilligankane



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-23
Updated: 2017-11-23
Packaged: 2019-02-05 10:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12792834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gilligankane/pseuds/gilligankane
Summary: Dolls pulls out his computer, turning it on as he plugs his headphones in. He plucks something off the table. “Don’t forget your note,” he says, handing it to her.Nicole frowns. “That’s not my note,” she says. This note is purple; she uses yellow.Dolls shrugs. “Well, what does it say?"





	i think this is how love goes (check yes or no)

**Author's Note:**

> College AU. A small break from the 80's Mixtape AU world, to get some creative juices moving. Don't worry, though. The update is still coming tomorrow.
> 
> Since the last Mixtape update was twenty-two and a half thousand, I wanted to challenge myself to do two and a half thousand instead. 
> 
> I also wanted to take a minute to thank all of the readers I have. It’s Thanksgiving here, today, and one of the things I am most thankful for are you guys; the ones who read through thick and thin. I am thankful that you exist, that you come back week after week and story after story. So, thank you.
> 
> Shoutout to Smurf for the title. From the song 'Check Yes or No' by George Strait. (Also, spoiler alert: the joke in this fic - you’ll see it - is 100% of the reason why I got a first date with my wife.)

_I’m late for Nedley’s class_ , is Nicole Haught’s first thought.

Her second is that she missed it.

Her third thought is that it’s _Saturday_ _night_ and she doesn’t have class on Saturday nights and she _needs_ to get out of this library.

All of these thoughts happen in under three seconds, her brain firing in short spurts as she tries to ground herself in some reality.

She scrubs a hand over her face, breathing in deeply through her nose. She’s alone in this section of the Ghost River University library, but noises start to flood in: the tapping of keyboards, the shuffle of papers, the squeak of highlighter against a glossy textbook page. There’s the soft hum from the fluorescent lights above her, and the sharp clack of heels in the stacks. Someone coughs and Nicole jumps.

“Scary movies,” she mutters.

“What?”

Nicole jumps again, a hand on her chest. “ _Jesus_.”

Xavier Dolls sticks out one hand.  “Dolls, usually.”

Nicole slaps his hand away. “Hilarious.”

Dolls drops his backpack onto the table, shaking it.

“Carrying bricks?” she mutters as she chases a pen across the table. “Why’re you here?”

Dolls shrugs. “I wanted to see if you were up for some of _The Killing_ but your roommate said you haven’t been around. This was my next guess.”

Nicole leans back. “I’ve got that test in Lucado’s class.”

Dolls, a year ahead of her, nods. “It’s tough, but Lucado is fair. Just know the material.”

Nicole gestures at her textbook. “I’m trying.”

“ _Generally, the role of the RCMP can be divided between law enforcement and social presence, the latest often being illustrated..._ ” she reads to herself. It’s the same sentence she fell asleep reading.

Dolls pulls out his computer, turning it on as he plugs his headphones in. He plucks something off the table. “Don’t forget your note,” he says, handing it to her.

Nicole frowns. “That’s not my note,” she says. This note is purple; she uses yellow.

“Maybe someone left it here earlier.”

Nicole shakes her head. “There was nothing on the table when I sat down.”

Dolls shrugs. “Well, what does it say?”

“ _You must be a hell of a thief because you stole my heart from across the room_ ,” she reads. She frowns and rereads it. “That doesn’t… I’m a _criminal justice_ major.”

Dolls stares at her, then shakes his head. “It’s a pickup line.”

“A what?”

“Someone wrote down a pickup line and left it for you while you were sleeping,” Dolls says slowly.

Nicole turns quickly, scanning the room. She checks her watch. It’s nearly 9:30PM now. She definitely remembers checking her phone at 8:45PM, to see if her brother finally texted her back. He hadn’t, and she makes a note to follow up with another string of emojis that, when decoded, tell him to stop being an ass and call her back.

_So_ , she thinks to herself. _Someone left it in the half hour I was sleeping_. She turns the note over in her hand again. The writing is bubbly - looping cursive L’s and long tails on the Y’s. There’s no signature; just 17 words and a heart. She leans back in her seat, her chair rocking onto two legs as she peers through the stacks.

“Huh,” she finally says, putting all four legs of her chair back on the floor. “Weird.”

Dolls raises an eyebrow at her, but turns up Bach’s _Bradenburg Concertos_ \- his favorite. She looks down at her reading, _The Role of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police During the Indian Residential School System_ , and sighs.

She balls up the purple sticky note and tosses it into the bottom of her backpack.

 

-

When Nicole wakes up in the library again, she curses under her breath. Yawning, she reaches blindly for her highlighter, but touches something else.

She blinks, staring blankly at the bag of M&M’S and a cold Coca-Cola sitting in front of her that wasn’t there before.

She twists in her seat. It’s nearly midterms and the library is packed, pushing people into Nicole’s corner of quiet. There’s two girls at the table near the windows, trading notes back and forth. One of them is in Chetri’s class with her. Dolls and a guy named Ewan are at the table right next to hers, spreading out their research project. There’s a girl with long, dark hair that looks _sort of_ familiar, but she’s sitting with a guy in a cowboy hat; Nicole doesn’t know guys who wear cowboy hats. The room has a quiet hum to it.

She picks up the drink carefully. There’s another purple sticky note on the back. This time it says, “ _Your name must be Coca-Cola, because you’re so-da-licious_.”

Nicole rolls her eyes shakes her head. This is the _third_ note this week.

One of the girls at the far table looks up as Nicole stands, watching her walk to the trashcan near the printer. She flips the soda and the M&M’S into the trash, the purple note fluttering down slowly.

She sits down and gets back to work.

 

-

Somewhere between defining the eight elements of an ethics program and the Ten Point Integrity plan, Nicole drifts off.

When she wakes up, there’s a new sheet of paper on her table - a flowchart, outlining the RCMP Governance Model for Values and Ethics.

Nicole looks up, surprised. She flips a few pages back in her notebook, comparing the flowchart to the notes she took. The flowchart is a hundred times better. The purple sticky note in the corner of the page just has a smiley face on it, “ _I thought this might help_ ” underneath it.

No cheesy pickup line, this time.

Nicole looks around the room and slides the chart into her folder for later.

 

-

Dolls wakes her up this time, dropping a blue sports drink in front of her. She sits up quickly, disoriented for a moment, but sees the drink and grabs for it. She twists the cap off quickly and takes long, desperate gulps.  
  
Dolls stares at her, fear and fascination on his face. “Do you even sleep in your room anymore?”

Nicole groans, capping the drink. “Would _you_ sleep in your room with a girl who calls herself ‘Perky Tits’? It smells like Axe Body Spray _all the time_.”

“If they start calling Greg ‘Perky Tits’, I’m moving out.”

“So you see my point.”

Dolls ignores her and points at a small purple sticky note hiding under her drink. “You got another one.”

Nicole sighs. “This is, like, the fourth one this week. I went to the bathroom yesterday and found one on my laptop when I got back. It said, ‘ _You seem tired lately. Is it because you’re running through my mind all day_?’”

Dolls snorts softly. “What does today’s say?”

“ _What do clouds wear under their shorts_ ?” she reads outloud. “Flip for answer.” She turns the purple note over. “ _Thundapants_.”

Dolls stares at her blankly. “It’s a joke.”

Nicole shrugs. “Looks like it.”

“I didn’t laugh.”

“You don’t laugh at much,” Nicole points out.

Dolls shrugs. “Fair enough.”

Nicole sighs and lets the note drift into the depths of her backpack, rubbing her eyes.

She needs to get to work.

 

-

Nicole slowly opens one eye. A hand reaches across her notebook, putting down a small, purple square on her textbook. She reaches out with the arm she’s been using as a pillow and grabs for the thin wrist in front of her as starts to pull back.

“Ah!” someone screams.

The shrill sound startles Nicole enough that she lets go of the arm she’s holding.

The girl the arm belongs to stumbles back a step, clutching her arm to her chest protectively.

“Oh my, God,” Nicole breathes out. She stands up abruptly, her chair rocking onto its back legs before it steadies itself. “Did I hurt you?”

“ _Shit tickets_ ,” the girl says. “No. No, I’m fine. You… you _scared_ me.”

Nicole takes a deep breath, her heart coming back down to resting rate. “I know you,” she says. “You-”

“Borrowed your pen last week, in Chetri’s class,” the girl finishes.

“Right,” Nicole says slowly. She narrows her eyes, looking at purple note on her book. “ _You’re_ the one leaving me things while I’m sleeping?”

The girls nods, her shoulders hunching in. “I totally was going to leave my first note while you were, you know. _Conscious_. But by the time I worked up the nerve to come back here, you were…”

“Asleep.”

“I knew this was a bad idea,” the girl says, exhaling noisily. “I mean, I _thought_ it was a good idea. I had a plan. I’m a planner.”

Nicole feels a smile tug at the corner of her mouth.

“I _planned_ on you being awake, though,” the girl continues. “And then when you weren’t, I thought I would just… leave the note. It was clever, right? I thought it was clever. Obviously, you’re a criminal justice major, and the irony of you being a ‘thief’ was supposed to be cute enough for you to be interested.”

A small light goes on in the back of Nicole’s mind. She suddenly feels like an idiot for missing that.

“But then I couldn’t stop thinking about how I pulled a slimeball move. My boyfriend, in high school, his name was Champ. He used to leave me sleazy notes all the time, most of them with very uninspired descriptions of the human anatomy.” The girl wrinkles her nose. Nicole feels herself frowning. “And I remembered that I wished he would have _asked_ before he did things like that and then I thought about consent - it’s really important, you know?”

Nicole nods silently.

“Without consent, we’re basically human garbage. My sister, Wynonna. Do you know her? She goes here. I think she might be friends with that guy, Xavier? Anyway, she says that without consent, we’re just heaping piles of human trash. I think consent is what separates us from primitive people.” The girl takes a sharp breath in, her cheeks flushed. “So I realized I left you this really inappropriate note, and I tried to make it up with candy, but that felt worse. Who leaves candy for someone? Like, hello. Give me the keys to a white midsize van with no windows, am I right?” The girl chuckles, the noise strangled. “So I left _another_ pickup line.”

Nicole opens her mouth to say something, but the girl keeps going.

“And then I couldn’t stop. Until I realized I was doing it again, so I left a different note,” she says with a wince. “The bad joke. My friend Chrissy told it to me and I laughed, but when I told my sister - you _have_ to know her. Everyone does. When I told her the joke, she said it was dumb and _of course_ you wouldn’t actually laugh at it.” The girl wrings her hands together nervously. “You didn’t laugh, did you?”

“I… did? On the inside?”

The girl’s shoulders drop slightly. “I knew it. That’s why I went back to pickup lines. Which were _terrible_ . I’m so, so sorry.” The girl looks up at her through her eyelashes. “I tried to make up for it with the flowchart. I saw your notes one day and they were… _horrible_ , so I made it for you to-”

“You made it?” Nicole asks.

The girl nods slowly. “It wasn’t hard.”

“Are you a criminal justice major?”

“Linguistics, actually.” The girl sighs. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know why I kept going. I should have just stopped after the first note. I don’t want you to think I’m some, I don’t know, _stalker_ who can’t take a hint. I don’t want anything you don’t want, and I know I seem-”

Nicole reaches out, her hand hovering between their bodies, the word _consent_ hot in the back of her throat. “What… what if I want your name?”

The girl pauses, her hands dropping to her sides. “Oh.” Her cheeks go red, but she thrusts her hand forward, her fingers bumping against Nicole’s. “I’m Waverly. Waverly Earp.”

Nicole takes her hand and shakes it. “Nicole. Nicole Haught.”

Waverly scoffs softly. “Haught. _Of course_.”

Nicole smiles and shrugs a shoulder. “So, Waverly Earp. Let’s see what you had to say today.” She reluctantly lets go of Waverly’s hand and reaches for the purple sticky note. “ _Hi.”_ She looks up. “Original. _No cheesy lines or terrible jokes today_ ,” she reads. “ _But I_ am _sitting in the second cubicle on the first floor, by the Folklore section, if I haven’t completely freaked you out  yet, or if you just want to see me make a fool of myself and tell you a line out loud. No pressure, Waverly Earp._ ”

Waverly’s cheeks are flushed pink, and something heavy in the pit of Nicole’s stomach turns.

“So what is it?”

Waverly blinks. “What?”

“You wrote that you had another pickup line. What is it?” Nicole leans back until she’s perched on the edge of the table.

Waverly’s mouth hangs open for a moment. “Uh, oh. I didn’t think…” She takes a deep breath and straightens her shoulders. “Okay. It was, uh, _You look familiar. Don’t we take a class together? I could have sworn we have chemistry_.”

It takes a minute for it to sink in, but when it does, Nicole laughs. “Because we…” She waves a hand between them, still laughing. “Because we take Chetri’s chem class together.”

Waverly’s shoulders sag in relief. “Yes.” She smiles widely. “You got it.”

Nicole smiles widely. “I did. Listen,” she starts, rubbing at the back of her neck. “I was just about to get a coffee. Can I… Can I buy you one?”

Waverly opens her mouth and snaps it shut just as quickly.

“Or not,” Nicole mutters.

“No, no,” Waverly says, reaching out a hand. It hovers in the air between them. “I just… The first thing that came to my mind was another pickup line.”

Nicole spreads her arms wide. “Hit me.”

“No,” Waverly says.

“Come on. What is it?”

Waverly sighs heavily. “ _Can I get you a coffee? Because I like you a latte.”_ She groans and covers her face with one hand.

Nicole laughs, reaching out and wrapping her fingers around Waverly’s wrist again, easier this time. She tugs gently, pulling her hand off her face. “It was cute,” she assures her.

Their hands hang between them. Waverly turns her wrist until their fingers lace together loosely. Nicole stares at them for a minute before her stomach gurgles and she remembers: coffee.

“You can get me the next coffee, okay? If it turns out, after this, you really do like me a _latte_ ,” she teases.

Waverly’s cheeks flush but her fingers flex in Nicole’s and she follows Nicole as they round the table.

“Oh, wait.” Nicole reaches back to the table and picks up the purple sticky note. She slips her wallet out of her back pocket and carefully tucks it into the billfold. She grins. “All set.”


End file.
